CALL FOR PAPERS

Elsevier - Computer Communications Journal
Special Issue on
Online Social Networks
http://www.journals.elsevier.com/computer-communications/call-for-papers
/special-issue-on-online-social-networks1/

Submission Deadline: 19 October 2014

Online Social Networks are a massively successful phenomenon, used by
billions of users to interact. Nowadays they are key platforms for,
among others, content dissemination, social and professional networking,
recommendation, scouting, alerting, and political campaigns. The
research interest in OSNs is multi-faceted, and exploits an unmatched
source of large-scale data about the human behavior. It spans a number
of disciplines, across numerous fields in and beyond computer science,
all the way up to the analysis of human social relationships and how
they evolve and mature over time. Moreover, the pervasive presence of
users' mobile devices (e.g., smartphones) has opened new avenues in the
design of mobile social networking services, and in the study of the
interplay between mobility and social interactions. Research in OSN is a
fertile ground also for industry, to develop innovative ideas fostering
the design of the new generation of communication platforms and their
services.

This special issue seeks contributions pushing the state of the art in
all facets of Online Social Networks highlighted above. We also
encourage original work based on an interdisciplinary research (at the
boundary between computer science and humanistic disciplines such as
sociology and anthropology) where quantitative evidence is available
demonstrating the mutual advantage of such an approach. Therefore,
purely methodological papers or papers that do not present quantitative
results with real Online or Mobile Social Networking technologies are
considered out of scope. Moreover, special attention is expected in
interpreting the proposed research results in order to shed light
towards what users may need and wish in terms of novel, practical
services and application.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following:
- Design of OSN platforms based on human behavioural models
- Analysis of OSN users' behaviour and its evolution over time
- Comparison of human social behaviour in Online and "offline" Social
Networks, and across OSNs
- Impact of Online Social Networks on human social behaviour
- Analysis of the use of social-networking sites in the urban context
- OSNs for supporting novel, social-oriented applications and services
- Mobile and Location-aware Online Social Networks
- OSN services enabled by the analysis of mobility and social behaviour
- Crowdsourcing for Online and Mobile Social Networks
- Dynamics of trends, information and opinion diffusion in OSN
- Smart recommendations and advertising in Online Social Networks
- Information extraction and search in Online Social Networks
- Privacy in management and analysis of Online and Mobile Social
Networks data
- Privacy, Security, Trust and Reputation in Online Social Networks
- Prevention of misbehaviours (spamming, phishing, ...) in Online Social
Networks
- Modelling of Online Social Networks characteristics and mechanisms
- Graph analysis applied to Online Social Networks
- Complex networks techniques applied to the investigation of OSN
- Data Mining and Machine Learning to gain novel insights on Online
Social Networks
- Novel distributed solutions for designing, supporting and operating
Online Social Networks
- Networking, computation and data infrastructure support for Online
Social Network systems


Schedule
Submission deadline: 19 October 2014
Author notification: 31 January 2015
Revised paper due: 15 March 2015
Final author notification: 15 April 2015
Publication (tentative): 3rd Quarter 2015

Guest Editors
Xiaoming Fu, Georg-August-University of Goettingen, Germany
Andrea Passarella, IIT-CNR, Italy
Daniele Quercia, Yahoo Labs, Spain
Alessandra Sala, Bell Labs, Ireland
Thorsten Strufe, TU Dresden, Germany

Instructions for submission
---------------------------
Manuscripts must not have been previously published nor currently under
review by other journals or conferences. If prior work was published in
a conference, the submitted manuscript should include a substantial
extension of at least 35% novel contributions. In this case, authors are
also required to submit their published conference articles and a
summary document explaining the enhancements made in the journal
version.

Papers must be submitted through the Computer Communications website at
http://ees.elsevier.com/comcom, where guidelines for manuscript
preparation can also be found
(http://www.elsevier.com/journals/computer-communications/0140-3664/
guide-for-authors). To ensure that all manuscripts are correctly
identified for consideration by the Special Issue, the authors should
select "Special Issue: OSN" when they reach the "Article Type" step in
the submission process.

For further information, please contact the guest editors at
comcomsi_osn at iit.cnr.it